Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

Although the remarkable outpouring of scholarship that accompanied last year's Thoreau bicentennial has slowed, 2018 has seen the publication of notable book-length studies and articles throughout Transcendentalist circles. Thoreau, now 201 years young, still generates attention with the long-awaited publication of The Correspondence of Henry D. Thoreau, Volume 2: 1849–1856 (Princeton) and timely considerations of his philosophy of resistance. Meanwhile, Emerson can boast the publication of the eminently useful Approaches to Teaching Ralph Waldo Emerson (MLA) as well as important transnational reconsiderations. Transcendentalism as a movement also receives welcome notice for its capacity, past and present, to inspire cultural change.

i Emerson

a. Editions and Reference

Volume 353 of Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau (Gale Cengage), is devoted to Emerson. The first section of this reference volume concerns Emerson generally, the second "Self-Reliance" specifically. Each section includes a biographical head note, a sizable collection of standard criticism, and an annotated listing of works for further reading. The collection is well-suited to scholars coming to Emerson for the first time. (In the interest of full disclosure, I served as academic adviser for the volume.) My annotated listing of Emerson scholarship, "An Emerson Bibliography, 2018," appears in Emerson Society Papers [ESP] (29, ii: 16–17).

b. The National and Transnational

Three studies this year maintain Emerson's cultural nationalism. A chapter of Nan Z. Da's compelling Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia) recognizes minimal value in Emerson's cosmopolitanism. Da characterizes Emerson's engagement with China as "provisional," "self-erasing," and of "limited transmission." The relevant chapter, "Extreme Reformality: Burning Bridges with Ralph Waldo Emerson," gives particular attention to his "Speech at Banquet in Honor of Chinese Embassy," arguing that it "reveals his practice of ephemeral cosmopolitanism, the need to protect the activational power of any particular idea against the problems and compromises that can arise when going too far with anything." Ezra Tawil's Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic (Pennsylvania) argues that, decades before Emerson and others delivered their (in)famous calls for a national literature, American authors defined their writing styles against those of the English in part as "a marketing slogan aimed at capturing a larger share" of a "transatlantic literary market." The practice enabled the more serious advocacy for literary nationalism that came later. In "Who Needs American Literature? From Emerson to Marcus and Sollors," pp. 65–88 in Jeffrey R. Di Leo, ed., American Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury), Di Leo compares the panic of 1837 and Emerson's consequent appeal for a uniquely American life of the mind with the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 and, as Di Leo so avers, its call for global reckoning.

For other scholars, Emerson's transnational sympathies are held in creative tension with cultural nationalism. Oisín Keohane devotes a chapter to Emerson in his Cosmo-nationalism: German, French and American Philosophy (Edinburgh), arguing that Emerson "is not only critical of such notions as Manifest Destiny, and the language of the national bond or racial determinism, but reveals how indebted and hospitable American thought is to 'foreign philosophy'" even while he "problematically privileges what he takes to be the cosmopolitan underpinnings of the USA." Keohane's is a worthwhile study for those concerned with how a particular philosophical method can express the universal if (or while) committed to the national. Two essays in Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence, ed. Paul E. Kerry et al. (Fairleigh Dickinson), explore differences in Emerson's and Carlyle's understanding of individual agency in the face of history and tradition. Tim Sommer's "Shakespearean Negotiations: Carlyle, Emerson, and the Ambiguities of Transatlantic Influence" (pp. 129–43) posits that Carlyle and Emerson employ Shakespeare's genius for diverging cultural purposes, Carlyle to impose Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural authority and Emerson to underscore a belief in individual creative power. In "Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and History" (pp. 35–51) Stephanie Hicks argues that Emerson's "decision to revise the theoretical model of history espoused in his...